50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)
npr.org
npr.org
Some other examples you already know:
- Big tobacco and lung cancer, cigarettes sold has healthy for decades [0]
- Big Auto and seat belts, they fought mandatory seat belts for decades [1]
- Big sugar (this article)
- Big Media and the apparent massive degradation in truthfulness of the 2010's
It seems that the truth can be purchased at the right price from the right organizations.
Teaching analytical skepticism needs to become a core curriculum for our schools.
[0] https://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/16/6/1070#:~:text=Seni....
[1] https://www.wpr.org/surprisingly-controversial-history-seat-...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
> Recycling plastic is "costly," it says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is "infeasible."
1. no infrastructure for sorting, there is no 100% method as of today (basically no research is done on this topic) 2. even if it is feasible, nobody does it becasue it is expensive. 3. there are countries where plastic recycling works, but these are outliners and countries who heavily invest in sorting, recycling on the consumer side.
So I have a PhD in mtls science, and I studied a bit of plastics thermo. However I never worked on the recycling problem.
Plastics, or polymers that aren’t cross linked, are in a sense easy to recycle - Just melt them and recast the part. 3D printing hobbyists even recycle their filament.
The problem is that any melted plastic doesn’t mix with any plastic other than itself. So if you have 99% polyethylene and 1% polypropylene and melt them together they won’t mix. But they won’t separate perfectly either (so you can’t skim the PP put).
Instead you get inter-penetrating phases (a spinodal). These phases have surfaces that don’t stick well together so the end result is that any parts made of this are exceptionally weak.
So this is the dilemma: if you have even 1% of different polymer in your mix, the plastic will suck. But we use at least 4 or 5 different plastics in everyday life all chucked into the same bins, all looking more less the same.
Solutions?
1. One solution is to heat all the plastics so that they break apart and therefore use them for feedstock. But this is very expensive, and the feedstocks aren’t very pure.
2 Make cat fuel. Cheaper then above, since the purity requirements aren’t as strong, but it’s basically the same as number 1. This doesnt increase CO2 emissions since the plastic is displacing oil
3. Burn it for energy. This needs far less strict requirements than 2 and lower CO2 emissions (since you don’t have to waste energy getting oil out). However, you’d have to basically ban public use of perfluorinated polymers or make them very expensive, or make them easy to identify (Teflon, gore-Tex.)
Frankly I’d ban perfluorinates except for use in critical industries. That chemistry is ecologically nasty.
4. Force companies to color their containers according to plastic type. I.e no more clear Pepsi or Coke bottles - all PE products are color, say green. All PP colors are red, etc.
I really think progress with plastics has to be before the materials ever reach consumers. And if we are to recycle it by throwing it in a bin, I think there needs to be an incentive for people to play along and not mess everything up.
- what infrastructure is needed for sorting? - what countries are successfully doing that? Taiwan? - can "expensive" be quantified?
1. tax it to discourage its use
2. bury it in landfills
GMOs can be great. Really I do believe that. But we’ve got these companies that don’t care about much beyond their bottom line pushing out GMOs that encourage extreme levels of biocide use and I and many others have a real problem with that.
I don't know where to look for information.
What books should I read? what websites have good information and explanations? whom should I trust?
Even if under current technology we are not able to profitably recycle goods, having an obviously detrimental to the environment material more heavily concentrated seems like a positive to me.
1. It's basically burnt bean water. Roasted is just a marketing term.
2. The constant rate of "New Study Finds Coffee Improves [insert health benefit]" articles
3. The incredibly powerful forces (industrial, corporate, personal) that would hold back such an event
I'm not willing to defend this hypothesis, but I would love some steel-manning
I take offense to this line. Roasting is a very complex thing, you have to adjust the roasting curves to each coffee individually for optimal results, to get the best out of it. There's more coffee than you might think.
Search for Specialty Coffee and the Specialty Coffee Association. You may also watch some of James Hoffmann's videos on youtube. He's the World Barista Champion of 2007 and has his own roasting company. Coffee doesn't have to be bitter or taste burnt, it can be fruity and sweet. There are more tastes to be found in coffee than in wine. In addition to that, the community is not filled with as many snobs as the wine community and there's a lot of science being done on all kinds of things (for example by the Coffee Excellence Center in Switzerland).
I think alcohol is next, before coffee. But we shall see!
I have a few coffee snobs in my life and they slowly are helping me see a light.
I am ok with caffeine being medicinal as needed than seeking a transcendant experience.
He made me appreciate filter coffee and brew a V60 everyday!
It's a cognitive stimulant that increases worker productivity.
So not only does the coffee industry have an obvious, direct incentive to promote the benefits and downplay any long term negatives, but EVERY corporate entity and even our government has an indirect incentive to downplay any negatives.
A company or society that hypes up it's young worker population on caffeine will likely out-compete organizations of humans that don't, even if major health problems show up later in life.
Listening to music:
1. it's just vibrations
2. constant rate of studies "listening to music improves mental health", "fetuses get smarter with music" etc.
3. the incredibly powerful forces behind music and keeping you listening to music
Therefore we'll hear that music is terrible for us soon.
We know excessive consumption (can't think of a better word off hand) of loud noises leads to hearing loss, tinnitus, etc.
Certainly not the same as "music is terrible for us", but more of an "everything in moderation" kind of argument.
And they can have my coffee when they pry it from my cold dead hands.
Yep, this has become so inflationary, but it doesn't mean that studies and findings are invalidated per se. If multiple (independent) findings come to the conclusion X, then the correlation becomes stronger and stronger. When the correlation is strong (multiple findings conclude X), then you can be reasonably certain that X is likely. Or am I wrong with this?
So, does that make toast “basically burnt bread”?
https://www.winespectator.com/articles/coffee-no-longer-requ...
Obviously you could be suspicious of all the studies that show coffee associated with decreased mortality because of Big Coffee's influence, but you'd need remotely plausible way to show any harm at all here. Sugar and tobacco are very different in that regard. People knew in the 1700s that there was an association between tobacco and mouth cancer, and shortness of breath had been observed forever. Once cigarettes made tobacco widely accessible it became even more apparent, though not proven. (Sugar is less obvious but there are lots of anecdotes in history about overconsumption, like Napoleon's wife who had nearly no teeth because of sucking on sugar cane as a child.)
There's also an interesting finding[1]:
"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
> The ALEC website states that its goal is to advance "the fundamental principles of free-market enterprise, limited government, and federalism"
It's right there in the open but I would guess most people never heard of it. A rich people private club to steer the country's legislation. I can't even imagine the level of corruption and self-serving interest
Do we really want QAnon (And on the other side, many of HN's crazy ideas) to be top of our politics?
Unfortunately that's 2014, forever ago in internet years, the tide is turning into the mess we have now.
But there are problems as well with that. Brexit is a good example. Rich people got their way by fooling the masses through targeted propaganda. And the masses got screwed (lost many rights) because of that.
But your sentiment is a little cynical/hyperbolic too for my tastes. Not everyone is a QAnon maniac. I think the majority of people are decent.
Maybe everything is exactly as it is reported on the news and by the politicians. I mean, they have a great track record so we should probably trust them.
But how is everyone so damn sure? I look at the history of manipulation like outlined in this story and am now mostly unmoved by the demands that we "listen to the science" when used as a cudgel.
I dunno, in both cases Big Oil is probably pretty interested in research that suggests coronavirus and global warming aren't real. Big Oil is at least as big as Big Pharma and, as far as I know, bigger than any "green" energy company.
Maybe they're politically toxic to researchers at prestigious universities, but if we're going to reduce this down to "who stands to profit?", Big Oil seems hard to argue against.
In the case of global warming I used to be a skeptic but was brought around as I saw more evidence of actual physical effects instead of just models. With COVID we are still under a bit of a fog of war, and it won’t be totally clear which statistics were right or which mixes of approaches were best until 10 years from now.
As for global warming, your acceptance of it makes sense. We do have to proceed in life without 100% clarity in anything at all. We can only make our best assessment and then proceed in good faith.
But i'm reminded of a story about ancient astronomers who held closely guarded knowledge not known by the masses -- such as being able to accurately predict eclipses. Unscrupulous actors of the time could perform miracles by telling everyone that they were going to shut the sun off in the middle of the day. Witnesses to such an event might start off as a skeptic, but be brought around as they saw evidence of this miracle man's ability to control the sun. The moral of the story being that even when we see evidence for ourselves, the explanation we're given about why it is happening should not necessarily be accepted without skepticism.
I expect that a lot of things that I now believe will be proven wrong. I have no idea which of those things it will be.
Or do you not even have friends and friends of friends that have lost someone and you doubt those deads are real?
Anyway, the point wasn't really Covid in particular, just that it's a contemporary example where most of us believe something that might very well turn out to not be an accurate appraisal with 50 years time in the rear view mirror. Most of us just take what we're told on faith, and have no direct way to verify that it is the whole truth. That is the lesson from all the cases of scientific corruption listed above.
How do we know today is any different than those examples above?
Obviously this approach could put the paper itself in question. How do we know it is not funded by "Big Fat". OK, that's silly but honestly where does the skepticism end and the truth begin.
Another way to look at this paper is that science is biased. It is biased in that people choose what to study. They decide what is "interesting". Given that resources to do research are limited, this has consequences. If they choose to focus on studying fat, then that may mean not studying something lese, like sugar.
Generally, scientists tend to be followers more than leaders. It makes sense to build on the work of others instead of striking out on a new path. New discoveries do not come easy. If the majority of labs are studying fat, then to a majority of people, including those funding research, studying sugar makes less sense.
This sort of herd mentality is certainly seen amongst programmers. I think it is even more extreme. As a programmer running with the herd, one lesson you could take from this is that whatever it is you are focused on right now might seem like the "right" choice of what to focus on that will lead you to the truth. If more or less everyone else is focused on it, too, how could the majority be wrong. The truth, however, which may not be recognised until some time in the distant future, is that you may be chasing the wrong thing.
I am very skeptical about the programming trends and areas of focus I read about every day on HN. I sense that is a minority viewpoint.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-sc...
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/13/climate-cha...
[1] original source of Guardian article: https://www.smokeandfumes.org/documents/document16
edit: add original source
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/11/19/archives/7-years-of-lobby...
We don't really need everyone working. Look at California with a $25B budget surplus this year despite record unemployment. With the right tax system cough land value tax cough we should be able to eliminate poverty and fund basic income.
But when people aren't working they get together and get ideas. Like storming the capitol or defunding the police. Plus they have time to execute on them. Keeping everyone surviving paycheck to paycheck with the threat of homelessness in plain sight is a good way to keep everyone calm.
Religious rituals - compelled or optional? If optional, self-excluding people lose the support and feeling of being part of something bigger and also lose the opportunity to join if they can't make themselves believe.
Education - compulsory to train children to grow into productive workers or freedom for children to enjoy their childhood even if it means lacking usefulness and discipline as an adult who then becomes useless and suffers emotionally?
Clearly separated gender roles - too separate is bad for people who don't fit well into either but too ambiguous may have consequences for family stability and thus the emotional wellbeing of children and stability of the society.
One culture or multiculturism - a common culture helps people function cooperatively and multiple cultures divides people and creates conflict. But a single culture can be harmful to people who it treats badly and they have no other option. I should clarify here that multiculturism in the west seems fairly harmless because it's neutered - minority cultures still have to bend to the laws of the dominant culture. If they had their own laws, the division would be greater but so would the benefits to misfits.
There doesn't have to be a conspiracy theory or derogatory label for these things. Societies try to figure out ways to operate that balance the tradeoffs.
The last one, I'd argue isn't new but the internet's ability to provide direct-from-the-source accounts of events and access to opposition sources allows the media to be fact checked in real time (or at least to notice incongruities with other stories). I'd be surprised if the situation is at all new. In fact, I'd argue that the media are the root cause of the previous three phenomenon you describe.
Those skills seem unaffordable to many. Suggesting this defense unpacks as belief in conspiracies. Which does seem a widespread strategy in low-trust societies, but doesn't seem helpful.
But I'm reminded of recycling's misdirection, encouraging people to act as an individuals to mitigate damage, rather than collectively through representative government to prevent it.
Perhaps the most impactful recent measure to increase truthfulness in US society, was making corporate officers personally liable for misleading statements? How might that be improved upon?
And there seem divergences between self image and actions, with respect to honesty, in many US subcultures. Potentially providing leverage for change?
Everybody knew cigarettes were unhealthy long before the 1960s. My dad was in high school in the 1930s and the kids called cigarettes "coffin nails". Doctors routinely advised patients to quit smoking. Any doctor who dissected a cadaver in medical school knew it was bad for you. A microscope or a scientific study wasn't necessary to notice the black, ruined lungs of a smoker.
Just try calling anything commonly considered to be "science" or "truth" into question and watch the attacks roll in. At its worst, it can end careers and livelihoods.
Yes, this is an instruction manual.
I cannot question everything i was ever taught in school. I have to assume that the basics physics is correct, that the fire safety and contruction people do their job, and that the doctor doing ths blood test knows what he is doing, etc.
The "degradation of truthfulness" has been going on since the times of William Randolph Hearst.
Each time...
- ...a news anchor has an opinion about what is being reported...
- ...a political analyst or book author is interviewed in a news show...
- ...a news outlet follows a partisan editorial line, tells you who to vote for...
... that's when journalistic integrity is lost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standard...
True journalism is descriptive, not prescriptive. It's about describing events, not forming an opinion about them. That's your job.
In this regard, most mainstream American journalism sucks. CNN and Fox News. Both indulge in the same behavior.
No news outlet is a replacement for your own critical thinking.
> But everyone is biased, including journalists. So the best we can do is to get rid of the false narrative that journalism can be descriptive, and simply embrace the prescriptivist journalism-with-a-slant.
My gut tells me there's something wrong with this, but I can't spot what. I'd be enlightened if you can point out the problem with the above perspective
The linked article doesn't mention any lie. It was mostly some people saying that it should be up to the person to decide whether or not he wants to wear a belt.
Research output is in the end one main criterias that we measure. Actual quality of it not so much. Thus science is driven to deliver publications. Now how valid these are is open to questions. And how many of them actually prove the mechanisms behind the findings? Probably comparatively fewer to those describing some correlation.
Big tech and the end of privacy plus firing people up with fear and hate using the maximal amount of lies they will individually tolerate and believe.
There's a popular YouTube channel [1] with advocates for a plant based diet, low in fat, yet suspiciously says almost nothing about hydrogenated vegetable oils (canola, soy bean, sunflower, etc).
These oils - according to many studies - are THE leading source of heart disease, right up there with sugar. They're a highly unnatural food, heavily processed, never before in nature were you able to consume the oil extracted from a f*cking sunflower like you can today.
And yet? NutritionFacts.org almost never, and I mean 99.9% of the time never mentions how bad these oils are for you.
Coincidence? I mean really, what CAN you believe these days? There's a study for this, and a study for that. Everything is bad for you.
Fred Kummerow spent his whole career, from 1957 until he was 98, getting trans fats out of stuff sold as food. In India and Brazil people are still trying to stop it.
Except if there was a button asking you to opt-in, literally nobody would press it.
there are few articles about this because this is biting the hand that feeds.
Won't work. Half of the world has an IQ of under 100. To question scientific dogma you would at least need an IQ of 110 I would think.
1) Red wine is good for health is consumed little daily.
2) WHO preaching at the start of the pandemic that everyone doesn’t need to wear masks.
We do need to be critical of what's told as truth in social or personal circumstances, for sure. I just sincerely doubt the WHO intended to harm people by making that claim.
Fears of MSG were started in a food lab as a racist bet/joke.
Propaganda research during wars was gifted to University rather than let the spending “go to waste”. We’ve been indoctrinated by advertising, marketing, as the move from fear of sky wizards to fear of national economic collapse became the new cudgel.
The Greeks wrote about hoping the masses never tried to check the top of Olympus. It was easy enough to keep the non-technical masses in check over C02 and the rest.
Let’s build more data centers for our start ups. Surely that has no environmental impact!
I’m hopeful now that our fear based flock management has shifted from complete nonsense to at least economic nonsense, making it tangible, we’ll start to collectively accept reality. All that energy doesn’t vanish it just goes elsewhere. All that debt isn’t real; it’s what we’ve been told to believe by the latest system of social control.
My reply was to a post highlighting when we’ve been lied to. I was just piling wood on the fire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Think of sugar (the fructose in sugar) as a poison. Your liver can neutralize any of myriad poisons at a strictly limited rate, fructose among them. So, choose consciously how much of each poison you want to eat, according to the load on your liver. Fructose and alcohol use the same pathway, so choose wisely.
Americans eat way more fructose than their livers can neutralize, and are dying from it in numbers that make COVID-19 look like the common cold. The autopsies don't say "died of sugar poisoning". Instead, they say heart disease, stroke, obesity, complications from diabetes, metabolic syndrome, hypertension... But it's mostly the sugar.
Jeff Bezos owns Washington Post. The biggest companies own the media distribution channels, Disney, google, facebook, etc.
Think about that fact when you see all the people being censored and deplatformed.
Think about why the establishment media shouts out racism 24/7, when using anti trust to break up big companies will help all races by improving their economic status?
Why is establishment media fermenting animosity amongst the lower classes, while the establishment people are getting richer by the second?
I think we'd be healthier if we officially renamed fat to lipids
https://aluminiumtoday.com/news/international-aluminium-inst...
I suppose copper and steel aren't too bad in that regard either.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1907207.stm
I believe they’ve given it the catchy name glassphalt
Why we don’t I have no idea. The fuel is basically free. And the co2 impact is much less than building energy storage.
I think people too often Go for the recycle (get it out of my sight) instead of the reuse and reduce angles of the conservation triangle.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
Of course Monsanto et al have invested a lot of money into research that shows that GMOs are safe. That is of course not in any way proof that there is anything wrong with that research, but it definitely makes me more careful in interpreting the results.
There is nothing inherently dangerous about doing this, and it has the potential to do a lot of good for humanity. It's important not to conflate the demagoguing of massive agricorps with a useful scientific technique.
The bigger scam is that, despite producing more calories than we could possibly use, they've continued modifying crops for calorie yield and chemical resistance, which has made a lot of crops less nutritious (per kg eaten), less tasty, and more dependent on advanced human intervention to successfully grow.
How about checking the research papers cited in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_cont...
Point being, there is money to be made on both sides.
I honestly never understood the objection to GMO. Identifying the gene that some plants have to resist disease & turning it off never struck me as any more inherently risky than the end result of a multi-generational cultivation process that ultimately selects for the same or similar variations.
At any rate, I'm not convinced it's so much a lobbying problem than appealing to a questionable public sentiment. How much of that sentiment is driven by profit and how much of it is driven by more mundane misconception is hard to tell (for me).
Edit:
> Big chemical and agtech
Not necessarily. Some GMO strains require less chemicals and make some of the tech redundant.
One trivial example is that Google, one of the richest company in the world, has been trying to build housing in its home town of Mountain View for 20 years. Last I heard, nothing had happened.
Don't prohibit GMO, just invalidate the patents and regulate the results. If everyone can select the seeds that are designed best downstream farmers and consumers benefit from the reduction of monopoly.
Literally the entire current farming industry. Especially the high markup “organic” segment.
The environmental and health impacts of new GMOs should be studied and regulated, but this "don't eat frakenfood" rhetoric or "No GMO" labeling aught to disappear as (as you've mentioned) it can be a huge win for hunger concerns.
> "We found that ties between researchers and the GM crop industry were common, with 40 percent of the articles considered displaying conflicts of interest," said the study.
> Researchers also found that studies that had a conflict of interest were far more likely to be favorable to GM crop companies than studies that were free of financial interference.
> Conflicts of interest were defined as studies in which at least one author declared an affiliation to one of the biotech or seed companies, or received funding or payment from them
The soy scare made by the dairy and meat industries. A few years ago they caused a mass hysteria with the meme "google phythoestrogens". Sure, they bind to estrogen receptors, but their action actually inhibits mostly, so it kind of block estrogen.
Meanwhile, the same people would have no problem consuming products from the dairy industry abusing cows by pumping them with actual hormones. Dairy products full of actual estrogen and progesterone (not phyto-, the real deal).
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=es&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=dair...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoestrogen#Effects_on_human...
Everyone I know who eats 90%+ carnivore diet looks/feels great.
CheapProcessedVeganFood co's perhaps?
I think if you are vegan and ate 90% tofu / pea protein / rice protein products, and spent the rest of your intake on avocados and olive and coconut oil and almonds and pecans, you might also look and feel great.
Nonetheless, "veganism" does not imply good agricultural practices or less money or power — likely the opposite. Do not think of veganism as your local farmers market. Think of it as mostly destructive monoculture farming.
Healthy ecosystems require ruminants and other animals and plants to thrive. Modern agriculture is usually split up — barren feed lots, barren corn fields, etc. Regenerative agriculture like what the Savory Institute espouses is what's needed.
Vegans are also a great target market and quite lucrative. People who can afford to be vegan will pay higher prices for lower cost goods. I wouldn't be surprised to see lobbying from vegan food companies.
Just make sure they know they're making the world a better place at your 32.30% gross margin (Beyond Meat). Compare to the gross margins of even big meat players like Pilgrims Pride or Sanderson Farms at 5-6%.
The plant based meat industry alone had a $4 billion market in 2020, about 39% of which is in the US, and it's total is forecasted to grow to $14 billion by 2027. [1]
While not a direct comparison, the US meat market is around a $7 billion annual market. [2]
[1] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/plant-ba...
[2] https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/market-size/me...
The corn lobby is definitely more powerful than meat or dairy are, yes.
It seems to be more of a red meat and saturated fat issue. I don't know about who might be behind it, or if it is even misguided.
Things are improving (slowly) through online forums, and MDs and PhDs creating content (like youtube, blogs, etc).
Heck, just be part of the longevity movement that is trying to do something about aging itself.
[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-8...
For longevity, check out SENS foundation (and Aubrey de Grey).
An example - BPA is used to coat the inside of tin cans. If you use a metal spoon to scrape out the contents, you're scraping away that lining into your food.
https://www.merieuxnutrisciences.com/corporate/en/news/endoc...
PVC pipes can leach hormone disruptors into drinking water:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315702292_Transfer_...
Packaging materials are not disclosed on the ingredients list, for example. Few people would know that the insides of drink cans or food tins are coated with plastic.
But speaking to regretful food decisions with lots of industry support and relatively little public awareness, I would rather our foods didn’t have so many emulsifiers in them.
Their risks to our gut biomes and immune systems weren’t appreciated when they were approved. Today they remain ubiquitous in typical American diets.
Apparently they wreak havoc on your gut flora.
And it's basically the most important thing for overall health.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevia#Safety_and_regulations
You could also argue Sucralose in moderate use, too. It's for sure much safer than the old sweeteners.
The other thing I'm very skeptical of now is milk replacements, like oat milk.
For cooking just use olive oil, coconut oil, or regular butter.
People with Coeliac disease mostly... doesn't seem like a very wealthy and well connected bunch though.
edit: the bad ones like sulfites, sodium benzoate, nitrites, etc...
I'm hopeful we'll get somewhere with nitrites. The whole celery salt dodge feels like the first step of a slow process to find something better, or perhaps figure out how to counter the nitrosamines.
Citric acid is also found naturally in citrus, it was not available economically in chemical form until the late 1970's/early 80's.
Now citric acid is a commodity after experiencing cartel-like activity before we got to where we are today.
It's the common tangy additive to food in all kinds of formulations.
I don't like it since it's an insidious buffer where each gram you consume would require a compensating amount of additional true alkali intake to fully neutralize.
If you wanted to be as neutral as you would be otherwise.
As an example natural orange juice has a fairly strong pH which can be moderated toward neutrality by adding citrate (the "alkaline" form of citric acid).
This is sold as "reduced acid" orange juice. You can tell the difference when you taste it because it is not as sour as the plain orange juice.
Often the citrate added is calcium citrate which also acts as a calcium supplement, but I still think it's not worth it.
Since pH is not total acidity. pH is simply a measure of how far away from neutral the solution is at the time. Often chemistry students have difficulty understanding this. There's lots of equations, they are confusing, plus quizzes and exams. Even the X-Prize for "ocean acidity" was awarded to the operators who had the most outstanding performance in pH measurements under the proscribed real-world conditions, but none of the participants actually measured total acidity at all, just furthered the capability for meaningful pH measurement. There were a number of PhDs involved and it appears to have slipped past them all.
Counterintuitively, the more of the "reduced acid" orange juice you drink instead of the plain stuff, the more you will need to include additional alkaline intake to remain as neutral, that you did not need when drinking only plain juice. Even though the plain stuff tastes more sour because it is.
As a commodity, like sugar, the supplier may have only one product to sell and there are excellent discounts when you buy citric acid in quantity. They've got plenty and can really deal. For instance if your recipe is attractive using one gram of citric acid per serving, if you scale up you could get a price break where putting in two grams is less costly than it was when putting in only one gram at first.
So the incentive is there to use more than you need if you are a food processor.
Still recommend citric acid for cleaning glass cooktops on kitchen stoves. It's not too abrasive and works pretty good for that.
With that combo I’m the healthiest I’ve been since my teens.
The fact that you can consume in 15 minutes more calories than you can burn in 150 minutes makes it a losing battle, especially since people who are already overweight often find it impossible for exercise for long periods of time due to medical complications.
The saying “you are what you eat” has much deeper meaning.
Just look at the obesity levels in US. The millions of people with heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
Looks at pictures of people from 1930s depression era, when lots of people were broke and down on their luck. The people look better and healthier, even with eating the meager food they ate with depression era economy.
The food back then were truly organic and natural, real meats and fats. What we call food now are processed blocks of chemical concoctions with added sugar.
I agree exercise is good but being fatigued I have relied mostly on diet to lose weight. I really enjoy running though so it’s a bit sad.
What does this mean? Can you cite something to back this up?
This, and the normalization of frying with plant based oils that denaturalize at those temperature seems to me equivalent to how the romans society was led poisoning themselves because most kitchenware like spoons and pots were made of led.
Plant oils such as those from olive, coconut, palm, cocoa or avocado have much less linoleic acid.
Although for what it’s worth my life got a lot better when I learned roasting, braising, simmering, reductions, etc and stopped trying to pan fry everything.
Common advice is to avoid seed oils - the cheap stuff used in restaurants such as canola oil. We didn't evolve with this stuff, it contributes to inflammation and is generally not good for you, but is used because it's cheap and not illegal yet.
I'd say common advice is to avoid cheap (refined) oils rather than seed oils. Point in case linseed oil is arguably even healthier than olive oil. Sunflower oil (cold pressed) is a great source of Vitamin E (in moderation because of omega 6:3 ratio). Cold pressed rapeseed oil (canola) is great, too. So is pumpkin seed oil ...
I agree, except I state it differently.
Chefs are supposed to cook at different temperatures when using different oils.
The real problem with olive oil for frying is the cost of the oil compared to lesser products.
There are also natural compounds in the virgin olive oil that can be destroyed by heat so it is considered beneficial to consume it without previous heating in things like salads or bread dipping to gain any benefits from components which are not in other oils.
The truth seems to be that there is no one "bad" food. Of course over consumption of everything is bad. But there does not seem to be any one food that is so bad that there is no safe consumption level.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180918-is-sugar-really-... [2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-3010.2012...
The article later makes claims about positive benefits of 'sugar' for elderly and athletes, but these cases are actually about glucose, not fructose which the article itself states is the culprit.
Now that I read it reference 2 is directly addressing Lustig's claims, so I thank you for providing it. I'll have to read through several of that papers references to see it the claims it makes are true. Even that paper does point out that multiple studies have shown that sugary beverages may be linked to obesity.
Edit: I read the relevant section of reference Hauner et al., 2012 (section 3.2.1 and 3.2.2) regarding effects of fructose and sucrose consumption on diabetes and there are several studies there which do indeed seem to have mixed results over large cohorts (tens of thousands of people). Thanks again for the reference, I'll probably dig into the individual studies, but it's not clear to me how meaningful results are where you just ask people what they were eating and then check two years later who got diabetes.
I'm tired of the all or nothing attitude that most people seem so eager to embrace.
Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
From Diabetes UK [1]:
> With type 2 diabetes, the answer is a little more complex. Though we know sugar doesn’t directly cause type 2 diabetes, you are more likely to get it if you are overweight. You gain weight when you take in more calories than your body needs, and sugary foods and drinks contain a lot of calories.
WebMD [2]:
> Eating too much sugar does not cause diabetes. Diabetes begins when something disrupts your body's ability to turn the food you eat into energy.
Montreal Children's Hospital [3]:
> True or False? Sugar causes diabetes.
> False. It’s a common misunderstanding that sugar causes diabetes. It doesn’t.
[1] https://www.diabetes.org.uk/guide-to-diabetes/enjoy-food/eat...
[2] https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/qa/does-too-much-sugar-cause-...
[3] https://www.thechildren.com/health-info/conditions-and-illne...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18944011
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12480733
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444941
As a side note, I recently remembered the existence of SnackWell's (they're still around a bit, I just haven't seen them in stores lately) - which were sold as "healthy" because they had no fat. But they were cookies! And full of sugar!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yudkin
Lest we not forget his arch-enemy Ancel Keys
This is also why there are some conspiracy theories. This was a conspiracy, and who knows what other conspiracies there are.
If scientits want people to trust the body of knowledge that people wrongfully call science (science is a process, see https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/what-science-is/), they need to prove they are trustworthy. But they are not. See https://gavinhoward.com/2019/12/replication-and-retraction-c....
Incredible story - they were super wealthy in Cuba - then played poor to come to the US to Miami - they are like one of the largest land owners in florida - their story is NUTS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanjul_brothers
These guys are largely responsible for a lot of the sugar consumption we have
Look at cheese/capita production and consumption capacities and graph that against aggregate insulin sensitivity averages.
According to the author, she was about to name her book "The Big Fat Lie", but eventually decided against it.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2UnOryQiIY
https://www.amazon.com/Big-Fat-Surprise-Butter-Healthy/dp/14...
It relies too much on sources that may be compromised or in conflict of interest.
Way too many people have conflict of interest, including scientists. In some domains it is hard to find those who don't.
It seems like it made it much easier to lose weight. Maybe food has more flavour and less is needed to eat.
And a large soft drink was competing with the giant burger in calorie count.
>There's new research on the best oils to cook with. If you’ve been hesitant to use extra virgin olive oil for high heat cooking, read on.
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/health-fitness/extra-virgi...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/08/brexit-back...
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/tory-mp-raking-cash-s...